Warning: My speculations are in italics. The rest is accepted historical fact. On St. Peter and Paul Day, 1613, during a performance of Shakespeare’s Henry VIII (or All Is True), the Globe theater caught fire and burned to the ground. The fire was allegedly started accidentally, by a cannon salute to Henry VIII. But was it an accident? There are several lines of evidence pointing to arson: the profitability of the fire, the theatricality of the fire, lines in the play that referred to the fire, the continuation of the cannon motif from Hamlet, and political/religious symbolism connecting Henry VIII and his divorce, Pope’s Day, Blackfriars, St. Dominic, and the defeat of the Spanish Armada.